Chapter 2

If OK with all, I’ve decided to take one or two topics from the chapter, learn more about them, then post my findings to the blog. Today, as we were reviewing the chapter in class, I jotted a few notes to myself in the margins of the book. When I came back to the dorm, I realized that three of the five notes I made were about customization, so I suppose you can guess my focus for today.

The search started with just looking into the overall trend toward customization. Several years ago I took a class about starting a small business. The teacher remarked frequently about customization and that our potential businesses should look at ways we could make our products or services as custom tailored to the individual as possible. That trend is alive and well, and readily available on the web, if not at your local retail store.

Mass customization - I had not heard this specific term before, but once I read about it, it was easily recognized. My Dell laptop, my pants from Land’s End, and my iGoogle desktop are all examples of this trend – taking mass produced parts and assembling them to make something uniquely mine (I just wish I had purchased my laptop after Dell started making colored cases). http://mass-customization.blogs.com/

From the link above, I decided to check out a couple of their pages about mass-customized articles that would be of interest to teens, t-shirts and sneakers. I learned about Threadless, a company that customizes t-shirts. This idea didn’t seem very unique to me, after all just about every mall has a store where you can choose a design and have it imprinted on the shirt of your choice. The novel idea at Threadless is they let the “members” make the designs and other “members” get to vote on whether the designs are good enough to print. If a person’s design is chosen they get prizes – and bonuses if it sells well. The company must be fairly sound because Inc. Magazine featured the company in its June 2008 issue. http://threadless.com/

Sneakers followed a more traditional customization scheme, similar to that of a Dell computer, although the sneakers could be bought in stores. There were some interesting examples of marketing. http://mass-customization.blogs.com/mass_customization_open_i/sneaker/index.html

RSS feeds, touted by one article as the killer app of the future (and are several of the items on my iGoogle desktop), are an example of mass-customization. These are great resources for life-long learning and are ways that teachers can help customize education for each student. Got a student interested in killer bees or any other specialty topic? Sign up for an RSS feed to get the latest information for them. Better yet, teach the student to use the feed themselves. http://technologysource.org/article/rss/

Then I “googled” education and content customization. Some post-secondary education institutions have really capitalized on this strategy. In pursuing these articles, I came across this quote and finally understood the term, the long tail, which of course is what customization is all about.

“Our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail”.
Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail’

http://cpe.ucsd.edu/blog/wp/?p=54

I decided to narrow the search to elementary education and content customization which turned up very little that was of note.

I was surprised, however…my final search, content customization and high stakes tests (one of the notes to myself I’d written in the text), was a winner. It seems that everyone understands that if a child can’t pass a high stakes test that something needs to be done, and that it needs to be done based on that particular child’s needs. There were numerous companies that touted their software or programs to help overcome a child’s barriers to passing the test, including ones who used multiple learning approaches so that the child’s learning style could be incorporated into the overall strategy for him or her. Many people blogged on the subject of high stakes tests.

What was wonderful was that one article brought it all together. It was by Gary Marx for the 2002 conference of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. He had lots of great things to say, but one that was extremely pertinent to my quest of the day - high stakes testing will drive the personalization and customization of education in schools. In essence he said that if that’s what teachers are given to work with, then they should use it to better the education for their students. One insightful thought he raised about high stakes tests - are we testing for the education needed for the future or are we testing the education of the past? How especially relevant this is to the chapter for the day, “Students and Learning.”
http://www.simulconference.com/ASCD/2003/scs/1273a.shtml